What's the point of getting credits when you can build research or production directly? Converting credits to research or production is a huge waste of resources. And since maintenance costs are so low, it means as long as you generate enough credits to pay for maintenance, you don't need economic buildings.
Also, for some reason the synthetic AI generates a ton of credits. I've seen the Yor with 300,000 credits. Which btw is totally worthless because rushbuy is inefficient. What's with that?
Rush buy may be "inefficient", but there are certainly times when it's nice to have on hand. I personally like to have a lot of cash on hand for either emergencies, ship upgrades, or diplomatic uses.
It may not be everyone's cup of tea, but I find it invaluable.
Rushbuy has very good uses, but you are correct that it is inefficient. It is more about timing and availability than efficiency.Especially in the early game when waiting for a ship or having it 'now' can make a strategic difference.
Indeed rushing has its advantages, if your playing with the ai on a low level you can get away with no rushing but it can still be helpful at time. Late game maintenance costs will also cripple you if you have completely ignored economic buildings. Maintaining a huge fleet gets expensive.
Generally though you don't needed as many economic buildings as production and research.
Money is at the moment really weak in comparison to production. They lowered rushcost multiplier from 15 to 10 in 1.02 but in my opinion it should be much lower.I played Endless Legend (a scifi 4x game) and there the rush costs were about 3:1 soI used rushing more often.I rarely have a planet generating more than 400 Income, and considering that eventhe basic factory is at 300 BC you can't use rush as an alternative to raw manufacturing.
I feel that the early expansion phase is way too easy. Because every newplanet has a positive income. Which is connected to the low maintainance of buildings.
If they made it cheaper to upgrade ships by a big factor, then money would actually matter more. Right now there's no chance I'll blow 2k on upgrading a ship that I'm as likely to lose as to keep the next turn. The opportunity cost is way too high. Right now I treat ships as built-to-die because they won't remain technologically valid very long, you can't repair them, you can't upgrade them, you can build one each turn, and you don't really pay much for them (no credit cost, no limit at all outside of production which is an ever-available resource. You don't run out of metals. You don't run out of trained and eager to serve young men and women to have slaughtered at the front lines).
Let it cost 200 credits to upgrade a ship to the next generation, and spending 2000k to upgrade 10 ships to a new shield and new torpedoes will make me put a higher value on that cash. Let me pay a little sum to repair a ship at a shipyard and I'll need to keep that cash flow positive. It would also make me care more about my ships and maybe start using unique resources on ships rather than planets all the time.
I think part of the huge ship upgrade cost comes from being able to upgrade a ship almost anywhere. Personally, I'd have preferred refits only taking place at planets/shipyards/starbases and at a greatly reduced cost.
That would be my preference as well. I've never liked that if you pay X you magically get an upgraded ship anywhere within your civ's borders. Ship upgrades should never happen farther then 3-5 tiles away from a shipyard / dry dock. Which would also give the developers room to cut the upgrade costs a good bit. In similar games, you always had to get your ship back to a planet with a shipyard before it could be upgraded. Maybe for refits you have to build a dedicated starbase within 2 tiles of a dry dock with a "refitting ring" on it.
Rush buy prices in 1.0.2 are about right in my view for colony improvements. Maybe need balanced slightly, but I don't find them hugely over/under priced for the things that I tend to rush-buy (factories for a brand new colony).
I would have more use for money if I could update an entire class of ships at once instead of:
1) Oh, look, I can't tell how many moves or hitpoints the ships of that fleet has.
2) Eject one. Is that the damaged one? No? Eject the next one. Is that the damaged one? No? Eject the...
3) Say, screw it, send them in to die, and spend 20 turns building more and shipping them to the front.
I would love to see upgrading ships cost 50% less if done at a shipyard you own.
I've managed to run my economy at a loss just through the size of my fleet on a few occasions, guess it might depend on the settings you choose. But generally I do build maybe 70-80% more research and production buildings than economic because it is less useful, but I prefer it that way.
Of course excess cash can be spent in diplomatic trading as well as rush building and upgrades so it does have uses.
If people want a specific case for upgrading ships, it's Survey Ships. I like to get a fleet of survey ships up and running ASAP. But since I get the vast majority of my survey fleet long before I have enough attack/def to ward off pirate guarded anomalies, having cash on hand to upgrade those ships becomes VERY useful since I don't want to throw away the extra range, move, or scan that those survey ships might have gotten by destroying them.
And even if upgrading survey ships to attack/def capable ones doesn't enter into the equation, just upgrading survey ships proper is a good idea since, as I said, I don't like throwing away the accumulated bonuses they might have received.
I like the way the game plays currently. Yes-- rush-buying ships is ineffecient. That means that 6 ship border patrol fleet is worth quite a lot, and losing it doesn't mean you can instantly replace it through money. On the other hand rush-buying planetary improvements is totally viable (it even scales down the cost the closer to completion something is) and often quite ciritcal to take advantage of. You really should be rush building your first factory on every planet. And guess what? You need credits for that. I suppose that means economy is not useless.
As of right now, the game forces you to make an interesting/difficult choice. Its really only feasible to rush one ship per year currently. What you have to ask yourself is "is now the time for it?". Maybe you need to get a construction ship out to get to resources before anyone else... or maybe someone declared war on you opening a 2nd front you weren't expecting... either way-- you likely only have the credits to react in a limited fashion, so the game challenges you to choose carefully.
An easy adjsutment for all this is simply to make the rush factor for ships scaleable as well. It stands to reason that something which is only 3 weeks from being built (building or ship) would be cheaper to rush to completion (paying overtime of course) than somethign which still had 2 months to go.
I've managed to make a loss once, but truth be told you can use one level 10 planet set to 80% econ, 20% manufacturing and that'll fund a 40-50 planet empire comfortably. Money is so easy to come by presently, and so limited in what you can do with it, that it's barely worth having in the game.
Lol-- so that's what you guys are complaining about? Okay, here's the thing-- once you've got a 40-50 planets empire-- you've already won and the game's over. Unless youre playing with some wacked out settings or its a one vs one and you oppponent has a similar empire, everything is woirthless at that point-- money, ships, planets-- losing a handful of any will not affect your overall progress.
My recommendation-- start a new game with harder settings (less habitable planets for starters) and let us know what you think about only having 3K credits left and havign to decide to rush either a coloniser or a constructor-- because you don't have money to do both early game.
I think you've had a bit of a logic fail there. If one or two medium economy words can comfortably support 50+ production/research planets by mid-game, then they can support 20-30 even more easily. If you're struggling to get cash, then try specializing a couple of decent-sized worlds in Econ rather than using the empire-wide wheel - you'll be drowning in cash in no time. It's very, very hard to find yourself running a budget deficit past turn 50 unless you rely completely on empire-wide management tools.
Even if holding 50 worlds means you've already won, the fact that you've managed to acquire 50 without needing to ever set up more than a couple of bank worlds means money is too easy to come by.
And yet, if Stardock makes money much harder to get, there will be complaints from a whole other set of people who aren't as good at generating revenue. .
It doesn't need to be much harder to get - I think maintenance could be increased globally by a couple of hundred percent and still not cause anyone any great difficulties.
they don't need to make it harder to get. if they want to address the issue, they can simply change the maintenance costs. maintenance in GC2 was a lot higher, so you'd usually run a lot more wealth oriented planets. spamming only research colonies with the occasional manufacturing planet in between gets a bit boring. wouldn't hurt if you'd actually need a proper economy to fund all those planets full of scientists.
I play MP and the Econ wheel & slider settings _still_ aren't being remembered between saves, which pretty much means you must rely on Imperial Econ settings for all worlds unless you enjoy remembering/setting the planet Econ every time you restore a game. (Protip: Don't. It gets old very quickly indeed.) That having been said, even when relying entirely on all planets set to Imperial Econ it's still a fairly trivial matter to turn a profit after 50 turns.
Since you only need 1 or 2 planets to be all-econ, it's somewhat less of a chore to reset it. Though I do wish they'd give us user-defined planet tags, so we can have a set of pre-defined wheel sets - being able to say 'all planets in Group 1, do 90% research, 10% manufacturing' is pretty much required for governing on larger maps, and would make resetting in MP a doddle (though yes, the settings shouldn't be lost).
I'd also like to point out that money is very useful in trading.
Especially when I don't want to trade my techs or resources to potential opponents, yet would like to obtain some juicy tech they have.
Buying various treaty agreements also works wonders to overcome negative diplomatic reactions.
In trade, money is the great lever. The more I have, the more powerful I can get.
One of the things I think happens with Econ being unbalanced is: Game Pacing.
I am pretty sure that game pacing has no effect on maintenance / costs to rush. This means that there will be a huge devaluation of credits in maps with Fast / Very Fast research / pacing settings. The game will end or at least be 'determined' by turn ~75.
However, if you were playing a very slow map, credits would mean much more. It may take twice as long to get to the deterministic win position (say 150 turns to know you can dominate the rest of the game). This might not be quite the same if you are doing an influence win since I'm pretty sure influence growth isn't determined by pacing, but you get the idea. In a normal to very slow map, maintenance costs are much more significant.
At the very least, I think they should have maintenance, rush buy, and influence all scale with game pacing / research. I would also be interested in something like inflation - costs go up as the game goes on for maintenance at least (again making credits slightly more useful). Likewise, they could just make credits more useful like being able to rush research, and/or lower the cost to rush ships and structures.
Exactly right.
I rush buy very rarely, but I like to trade money for techs and resources where possible. Money and open borders/non-aggression for techs. Sometimes buy a treaty, can be a life saver. (Since at higher difficulties you are usually behind at the start for quite a while.) And a bit of a stash for a rainy day. Rainy days don't happen often in space, but you can never be too careful.
I take sharp issue with anyone who says money isn't worth much in the game as it stands. Perhaps some tweaks might be useful, perhaps a bit more maintenance, I dunno.
But I love my colony with eleventy-seven markets surrounding a financial capital. Yummy.
If anyone has any worthless cash they want to pass along, our Brinks Ship will visit you for FREE.
Right now, the only thing I use rush buying for other than early colony ships, is upgrading buildings on science worlds.
I save a lot of science by not having to slide the slider to manu to build the buildings.
I wouldn't say it's worthless. I'd say it's too easy to get, which is even more true considering that you can use it to complete the tech tree without ever trading away a single tech - in fact, it SHOULD be nearly worthless in trade considering how easy it is to come by. But the AI over-values it, leading them to trade away half their techs for the cost of rush-buying one colony ship. They take no account of the fact that, if they're swimming in cash, it might not be worth selling their techs to gain a relatively meaningless amount.
It needs a rebalance; rush-buy cost multipliers should be reduced considerably (and should scale with production already committed), upgrade costs should be nerfed through the floor (since currently there's no good reason to ever upgrade any ships - you can just build new ships near-instantly using hyper-industrial shipyards) and maintenance should be tripled or more so that building a big war chest actually requires some level of effort, rather than happening more or less automatically as long as any one planet is dedicated to banking.
I should not be able to become the financial capital of the universe when 90% of my planets have no financial buildings. You can't lead the universe in research without making 50%+ research worlds; you can't be a manufacturing colossus without making most of your planets industrial. So why can you have as much money as you could ever need from just one or two worlds?
There are many great features available to you once you register, including:
Sign in or Create Account
